Gamer Savings Time: X-men Legends Review

Anyone that has ever had money troubles knows that it’s tough being a gamer when low on cash.  With the current generation titles costing between $45 and $55 used, buying a new game seems impossible. My new review series, Gamer Savings Time, takes a look at some older titles you cash-strapped gamers can pick up for minimal green.  With X-men Origins Wolverine right around the corner, I thought it would a fitting time to look back at the well-received X-men game from 2004, X-men Legends.

X-men Legends is categorized as an action RPG, and developer Raven Software sticks to that formula pretty tightly. You pilot a team of 4 X-men (chosen from a roster of 15), through 15 missions inspired by, if not directly based on, X-men stories. You are able to switch between your 4 chosen X-men on the fly using the D-Pad and at set X-traction points you are able to change your team completely. So, as a player, you get exposed to a lot of X-men and their various powers. Personally, my favorite team consisted of Wolverine, Cyclops, Iceman, and Rogue. If you have friends, you can play with up to four players with each one commanding an X-man on the team. In this case, you are stuck with the mutant that you’ve chosen, so choose wisely.

Like most RPGs, everything is a numbers game. From, your agility to your lifting strength, every aspect of your character’s abilities are leveled up throughout the game. This allows you to customize your character’s strengths and improve any attacks that you like to use while ignoring the ones that you don’t. However, I’m not going to bore you with the aspects of “How an RPG works”. I am going to say though, that if you are not accustomed to playing RPGs the level and upgrade menus will throw you for a loop. If you come into X-men Legends expecting a generic beat-em-up or hack and slash you will be sorely mistaken.

While the core gameplay consists of you running around with your characters and punching enemies frantically until they die, the sheer number of ways you can do it is huge. Each character has mutant powers that when combined with the powers of their peers create combo moves. Not only are these “combos” visually pleasing, but they also do massive amounts of damage and bump your experience points. By the time you reach the end of the game your mutant powers are leveled up so high that your character is literally destroying the environments that surround them in one punch. Also, if you take the time and kill every enemy on every level the difficulty of the game will not spike and you will have a pretty easy time running through all 20 hours of the story.

As for the story, it is a pretty true to form X-men story, Magneto has a plan that sees mutants take over the earth and an American General: Kincaid has a plan to rid the world of all mutants (sound familiar?). Professor Xavier and his team are obviously stuck in the middle, wanting peace between both parties. The story revolves around Magma (Alison Crestmere) and her life after the X-men prevent Mystique and the Blob from kidnapping her. She becomes a student at Xavier’s school and subsequently becomes an X-man. This story structure allowed Raven the ability to drop the player into the shoes of a character and as that character learns about the X-men team, so does the player. During the game, Alison gets to hear a lot of optional back story. This really appeals to casual fans of the franchise, like myself.

X-men Legends does a lot of things right but is also does of a lot of things very wrong. While most licensed games can be whipped through extremely quickly (sometimes in one sitting), Legends makes your experience with the game extremely lengthy. At first glance, this may seem like a good thing, but most of the game’s length comes from its repetitive gameplay and its reuse of environments. During the campaign, you play through the Morlock underground at least three times, and mutant power, punch, punch, heavy punch is a combo that gets old really quickly. At about the 15-hour mark, I began to wonder if the game would ever end and stopped doing the extra exploration for the backstories of characters.

Constantly micro-managing every one of your character’s abilities is tedious and game slowing. Had some sort of auto-fill feature been built into the leveling system, the game wouldn’t have crawled along as it did. Also, as should be, Wolverine really takes center stage with his healing ability. The problem with that is that after about level 5 if leveled properly, Wolverine’s attack damage and damage taken ratios will be so far out of whack that he is almost impossible to kill. This makes him the obvious character choice to play with when tearing through a level, and also kills the use of the other characters in the roster. Unless there is a compelling reason to play with a character, a gamer is going to go with what works, and Wolverine works every time.

Finally, the art in the game is loosely based on the Ultimate X-men comic series, but whoever they got to design the character models is in the wrong line of work. Between, Beast’s mullet ponytail, and Iceman’s dew-rag with matching armband the artistic choices throughout the game need to be questioned. With that said, the game runs at a super smooth 720p, which on the original Xbox, is awesome.

X-men Legends as a licensed game is fantastic, but as a video game it is “playable”. If you like Action RPGs like Fable, Kingdom Hearts, or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, then you will probably get a kick out of this one. Even though it has many flaws, the most important thing about any video game is that it be fun and X-men Legends accomplishes this beautifully. Also, if you like this game, it has a sequel (X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse) and a spin-off (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance), both of which can be picked up on the cheap. 

3/5 Stars.